Medieval Scottish Ecclesiastical Toilets

Medieval Church Toilets in Scotland

Locations

Saint Andrews

A Pictish stronghold was once on the site of
Saint Andrews, Scotland,
and records from 747
report the death of an abbot.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, the settlement was known
as Kilrymont (a Normanized spelling of the Gaelic
Cell Rígmonaid)
or Muckross.

The Church of Saint Regulus was built in the 900s,
commemorating the legendary arrival
of that saint bearing the relics of Saint Andrew.

The town was known as Saint Andrews by the 1100s,
when work began on the new Cathedral of Saint Andrew
in 1158.
The Saint Andrew Cathedral Priory,
a priory of Augustinian canons, was next to it.

Franciscan and Dominican monks had properties in the town
by the late 1400s and possibly as late as 1518.

The cathedral fell into disuse during the Restoration,
and the cathedral was stripped of its altar and images in 1559.

One of the few priory structures left is the
necessarium,
the communal toilet facility.
In the 19th century the term
reredorter
was coined, from the Middle English prefix rere-
(from Anglo-French) meaning "behind" and the medieval
term dorter for the monastic dormitory.

The monastic dormitory was typically built on the east
side of the main cloister, and its
necessarium was usually attached to its south
or east side, putting it along the dormitory walls
furthest from the church.

Isle of Iona

The
Isle of Iona
is a small island in the
Inner Hebrides, off the north-west coast of Scotland.
It's small — just 1.6 km east-west and
5.6 km north-south
with a resident population of 125.
It's just about 1.5 km across the narrow Sound of Iona
from the larger Isle of Mull.
Its Gaelic name is
Ì Chaluim Cille,
meaning Saint Columba's Island.

Its highest point is an Iron Age hill fort on
Dùn Ì, 101 meters high.
It is speculated that it was a sacred island in the
pre-Christian Iron Age civilization of the Hebrides.
There is no physical evidence for this, but it might
explain its selection for what followed.

In 563 Colm Cille,
later known as
Saint Columba,
was exiled from his native Ireland because of his
involvement in the Battle of Cul Dreimhne.
He came to Iona with 12 companions and founded a monastery
from which they set about the conversion of Scotland and
much of northern England to Christianity.

Iona became famous as a place of learning and became a major
pilgrimage site.
Several kings of Scotland, Ireland and Norway were buried
there, including:
Kenneth I King of Scots,
Donald II King of Scots,
Malcolm I King of Scots,
Duncan I King of Scots,
Macbeth King of Scots, and
Donald III King of Scots

It's believed that the
Book of Kells
was created on Iona in the late 700s.
A series of Viking raids on Iona began in 794
and the book, relics of St Columba and other valuables were
taken away, including the book being taken to Kells in
Ireland for which it got its name.

The current Benedictine abbey, seen here, was built starting
in 1203.
A nearby convent for the Order of Benedictine Nuns was
established in 1208.
The abbey flourished until the Reformation.

The Iona Abbey itself
was granted to the Church of Scotland.
It was rebuilt in the 1930s when the
Iona Community
was formed, an ecumenical Christian community.
It has more recently become a site of Christian pilgrimage
and retreat.

When you're looking for eccelsiastical toilets,
look for the necessarium or
reredorter.

The maps and diagrams at the abbey indicated that this
building was the reredorter.
Notice the small rectangular opening near the corner.

Yes, here's a sign at the corner of that building!

Once you find the reredorter itself, there's an
explanation of just what that name means in
modern English.

And here's all there is to see — what looks like a
narrow crawlspace running the length of the building.

Back in the days when this was a
functioning necessarium,
you would not have wanted to crawl through here!

The toilets would have been a series of seats on holes
through a long bench directly above this rectangular trough.

Water would have flowed through here, carrying the waste
down to the nearby shoreline.

This is the nearby Benedictine convent, close to the modern
ferry dock and on the edge of the village of Baile Mòr.

Its reredorter seems to have been under this modern road
running between the convent ruins and the local school.

So no more than a site-of picture for the convent
itself...

Where next?

If you're interested in visiting, the easiest way to get
there is to a bus or train to Oban.
Several ferries per day run from Oban to Craignure
on the Isle of Mull.
A bus meets each ferry for the roughly 1.25 hour trip across
Mull to Fionnphort.
From there the ferry runs back and forth across the
Sound of Iona to the ferry ramp at the village of
Baile Mòr.
The ferry runs constantly all day,
making a round trip every 30 to 40 minutes.

My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001,
although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous
Toilet of the World page until
January 17, 2002.
Some time soon after that I split it into categories,
and the collection has grown ever since.

In December, 2010 I registered the
toilet-guru.com
domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.